This big, audacious novel traces the plans to lay an underwater telegraph cable from Ireland to Newfoundland between 1857 and 1866. Building lively fiction on a foundation of historical fact, John Griesemer conjures a cast of bankers and less worldly dreamers bent on profiting from a new technology: the dotcom entrepreneurs of their day. We begin in a London of stenches and fogs, where a colossal ship is being constructed. A fundraising show for the Atlantic expedition comes to town; the Phantasmagorium (a spectacle featuring automata and live entertainers) is a runaway success.

Its reluctant star is American Chester Ludlow, guiding genius of the telegraph project. This cable guy falls for his musical director, Katerina Lindt, who is married to a knicker fetishist with a jogging addiction. Meanwhile back in Maine, Ludlow's actress wife, Franny, becomes a spiritualist medium. (Many of the characters are performers or artists.) Mrs Ludlow soon succumbs to a fraudulent clairvoyant, who simulates spectral knockings by cracking his anklebone. The sexual politics grow increasingly complicated.

As with the iconic Victorian novels that Signal and Noise emulates, the cliffhangers are as unremitting as the coincidences that drive the plot. Several of the archetypes of 19th-century fiction appear: the obsessive scientist, the ghostly waif, the sorrowing wife, the venture capitalist. (The latter, Beaumol Spude, reads like a Missourian cousin of George Eliot's Bulstrode.) But unlike the Brontës or Trollope, Griesemer writes a workmanlike prose, which mostly does its job but occasionally tangles him up. ("He had sunk - literally, for the first, failed cable was on the bottom of the ocean - thousands into the project, and yet he wanted to go for more.") Although his depiction of the minutiae of a troubled marriage is touching, Griesemer achieves most when painting a larger canvas. He moves gracefully between London, the storm-tossed Atlantic, New York and rural Ireland.

The laying of the cable and the shadow world of the seance are described sharply; soon these are coaxed into becoming metaphors for one another. (Each carries messages from distant realms.) If the symbolism is not always persuasive, its existence adds alluring depth to what might have been merely a ripping yarn.

Before long, the book begins to argue with itself about ideas of interaction, and here it presents uncomfortable and very modern questions. Is authentic communication possible or even desirable? Is technology a freedom or a subtler form of slavery? Given the chance to speak honestly, what would we say? There are powerful sequences of almost Beckettian sadness, in which telegraph operators have to transcribe the random signals sent down the damaged cable by the movement of the sea. At these points the claustrophobic grip of the historical novel is loosened and Griesemer bursts into much darker territory. The philosophical speculations cohere in the novel's most complex personality, Otis Ludlow, brother of Chester. A half-blind consumer of magic mushrooms, Otis brings shamanism to this already boisterous party. An intriguing and unforgettable presence, he haunts the book in richly ambiguous ways.

At heart, this clever novel is a meditation on that most unAmerican of topics, failure, and Griesemer has the courage to let it be exactly that. The novel feels carefully researched. That said, pedants will find sporadic cause for excitement. "Sodding" and "bullshit" are included, anachronistically. (Both later 19th century, as every geek knows.) And more worrying infelicities occasionally intrude.

Marx, Brunel and Abraham Lincoln have enjoyable walk-on parts. Dickens appears too, as a secret author of hardcore porn. Old Boz might have enjoyed Griesemer's characterisation of Maddy, who has so many shades of the stereotypical tart-with-a-heart that she could have stepped from the pages of Oliver Twist. Such quibbles aside, Griesemer's novel is capacious, gutsy and often gratifying. Like the great undertaking it immortalises, there are a few strange turnings along the way, but Signal and Noise succeeds in the end.